THE WAKKER WEEKLY - Issue #1351 - Posted on: 19-Dec-2016

BUSHWAKKER NEWS

Our premium red wine for December is The Grinder Pinotage from South Africa; $8.95 for a glass and $23.95 for a half litre. The white is Bree Riesling from Germany; $8.50 for a glass and $22.95 for a half litre.

Our guest tap is currently pouring the Sundog Belgian Whit from the Churchill Brewing Company in Saskatoon, making its Bushwakker debut. $7.95 for a pint. Next up is the Paddock Wood Heartstopper Hot Chocolate Stout. A rich chocolate stout with medium bitterness and a sweet finish with a hint of cayenne.

A big “thank-you” to everyone who came out for our annual “Missiletow”Christmas Ale Release on Saturday, December 10th. All 250 bottles sold out in less than an hour. We will offer this rich and malty English-style barleywine on tap all holiday season.

Bushwakker Gift Ideas for the Craft Beer Enthusiast on Your List. We still have a few “A Friend With Mead is a Friend Indeed” Blackberry Mead t-shirts left. We also have a few Bushwakker/Joe Fafard 25th Anniversary t-shirts available for only $20 including tax. Growler gift boxes include your choice of a glass or stainless steel Bushwakker Joe Fafard growler, two pint glasses and a gift certificate redeemable for a growler fill. Our Christmas Variety Six-Pack includes some of our seasonal and specialty offerings including bottles of Blackberry Mead and, as of Monday, Missiletow Christmas Ale, or you can’t go wrong with a Bushwakker gift card!

Our Sodbuster Brown Ale is available for growler fills at the Quance Street SLGA store in Regina for the month of December. Three other Saskatchewan brewed beers are also available. Be sure to support this SLGA pilot program and help grow Saskatchewan craft beer. If successful, more SLGA stores may also offer growler fills in the future!

Bushwakker Prime Rib Weekends Return. Back by popular demand! Our melt-in-your-mouth, low-and-slow roasted prime rib dinners with jumbo Yorkshire pudding have returned. And Sunday dinners just got a whole lot better at the Bushwakker! Choose from either an 8 oz. or a 10 oz. cut. Prime rib is definitely one of Bushwakker executive chef Mike’s specialties.

The Bushwakker is now OPEN ON SUNDAYS from Noon to Nine. Enjoy our Sunday New York Steak & a Pint feature.

Our Bushwakker Local Artists Wall for the month of December features the work of Quin Greig. Her bio is as follows:Quin C. Greig was born in Swan River, Manitoba in 1988. Raised on a remote acreage, Quin spent much of her childhood among animals and nature playing solitary “games of imagination.” Her relatively isolated formative years would have a profound effect on her personality, creativity, and the subject matter of her artwork. Quin received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction from the University of Regina in 2013 and is now a practicing interdisciplinary artist. Experienced in oil painting, intaglio printmaking and sculpture, Quin specializes in watercolor drawings. While interested in mysticism and the occult - She is simultaneously, and just as importantly, influenced by the people and symbols that surround her in her daily life. Through her work, Quin represents the ways in which she feels she has encountered magic, synchronicity, and archetypes from the Jungian “collective unconscious” in her own unfolding narrative. In this series entitled "Soul Food," Quin explores the potent symbolism of a variety of culinary items - employing them as metaphor for psychological and spiritual subject matter. Quin has spent years refining her signature style of line work, and has been commissioned for several label and tattoo designs - as well as myriad other projects for private individuals. Quin currently divides her time between her home studio and The Bushwakker Brewing Company where she has worked as a server since 2011.

Dec. 31: NOTHING FOR NEW YEAR’S – BUSHWAKKER 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION. As we bring our quarter century anniversary celebrations to a close, we decided to take our very popular Nothing For New Year’s event…and do even less than ever! No band, no dancing, no tickets, no cover charge, no line-ups, no noisemakers, no elevated drink prices, no free cheap champagne, no midnight buffet, no dressed-up staff, no smooching at midnight, no Auld Lang’s Syne, no decorations and no special meal – but we will have our regular weekend Prime Rib & Jumbo Yorkie dinner feature. And if you want to make a reservation…No Problem! We wish you good health, happiness and a prosperous 2017!

Sometime around 1890 in Germany a fortunate mishap in the depth of winter led to the accidental discovery of ice beer.

Beer has a long history of accidents. Historians have speculated that a sack of spilled barley, left out in the rain, produced the first pint somewhere in the Fertile Crescent as microbes and yeasts did their magic on the grain. Much later, when British pale ales spoiled during long boat journeys to colonial India, brewers had to boost the alcohol and hops levels as preservation measures, resulting in the first India pale ales.

Sometime around 1890 in the German city of Kulmbach, there occurred another fortunate mishap. It happened in the depth of winter, according to legend, when several barrels of bock-style lager were left unintentionally in the yard of a local brewery at closing time. That night a deep freeze settled on the land. Snow fell, too, and the forgotten barrels disappeared under a foot of fresh powder. Days or months later—accounts vary—the brewmaster discovered the barrels. The beer within had frozen, expanded and burst open the casks. Upon closer examination, the brewmaster found that a central core of deep brown, super-cooled liquid remained within the ice—and it was delicious and doubly strong, an amplified version of the starting beer. The ice within the barrels was almost pure frozen water, and in effect, the beer had been distilled. The brewer, so goes the legend, so enjoyed this strengthened beer that he began making it every winter. So was born the eisbock, still a popular style, hallmarked by the Kulmbacher Eisbock itself—the original ice beer.

In modern times, brewers no longer rely upon cold nights and snow drifts to produce these beers. Rather, they recreate the process, sometimes in walk-in freezers. Ice distillation is the name of the game. While illegal for commercial purposes in the United States, ice distillation is perfectly acceptable in Europe, and the beers face no barriers, either, from export to North America. Thus, many eisbocks are available, and an interesting one to sample is that of Aventinus, as it can be tasted next to its undistilled counterpart, the Wheat Doppelbock. The original beer, 8.2 percent alcohol, tastes up front of toffee, candy, cloves and caramel, with a blast of heavy wheat on the finish. The Weizen Eisbock, at 12 percent, smells hotter and tastes of mulled wine and Christmas spices. The Kulmbacher Eisbock is a bit less strong, but nuttier and thick with caramel and maple.

Other European breweries apply ice distillation to non-bock beers. BrewDog in Fraserburgh, Scotland, for example, released the Tactical Nuclear Penguin in late 2009. Made from an imperial stout—10 percent ABV to start—the Penguin was ice distilled again, and again, and again. Upon completion of its final round, the fluid measured 32 percent ABV. I was lucky enough to taste it. The beer is overwhelmingly ashy in taste, very burnt and smoky, with intense sweetness, nonetheless. The overriding effect is that of sharp alcohol. The Penguin was hailed for several months as the strongest beer ever made. Then, in January, the German brewery Schorschbräu announced the release of a 40 percent ABV eisbock that has been shown to literally burn. Clearly, the game is getting crazy.

While American brewers stick to the sidelines, just as in the old days of beer evolution, accidents can happen. In Bend, Oregon, a winter night and a bizarre twist of fate in the late 1980s rendered an enhanced beer after a burglar busted into Deschutes Brewery, snatched a keg of the company’s winter release, Jubelale, and abandoned the heavy load just a block away.

Discovered at dawn, the keg of beer was frozen except for an interior pocket of ice distilled liquor. This winter, Deschutes brewed up Jubel 2010 to imitate (without freezing) that accidental beer of so long ago. The 10 percent ABV beer tastes of tart fruit, some faint vanilla and satisfying heavy malt.

I ice distilled a few beers at home with mixed results. In one experiment I poured five bottles of Brutal Bitter from Rogue Ales into a single glass vase. Several hours in the freezer made a slush of the beer. Turned on its side on the counter and drained for 15 minutes into a bowl, a darkened version settled out of the ice. The beer had been a firmly hopped IPA before and was now enriched in maltiness, bitterness and color — and noticeably strengthened in ABV. Sadly, a six-pack was reduced to two beers’ worth. I also froze five bottles of Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale in the same vase. Solidified into a slush, then drained, 20 ounces of dark, sweet beer emerged—a barley wine, perhaps? But the great surprise of the experiment was the can of Coors Banquet. This piece of shit, frozen and then punctured with a screwdriver, spewed two ounces of sweet, rich and powerful lager into a stein, and—no joke—it almost tasted like Duvel.

Freezing beer can work wonders. The three drawbacks to the process are a reduced volume of beer, loss of carbonation and the risk of attaining a nasty “freezer burn” taste if left too long in its chilly confinement. However, for special occasions, ice distillation is a party gag about as good as they get.

Editor’s note: We are unsure if "ice-distillation" is a phrase used in the industry or if Alastair made it up. Regardless, it is problematic. "Distillation" is clearly a way of separating and concentrating liquids using their variable boiling temperatures. We suppose that there is an analogy here in that by freezing the water out of a liquid we are just substituting "freezing" for boiling" and using the remaining portion instead of the removed portion. "Distillation" is normally used to refer to the process of evaporating or boiling away and then condensing a liquid, like alcohol, that boils at a lower temperature than water, in order to separate the liquids and concentrate one of them. Freezing can also be used to separate liquids, usually by freezing out water which freezes at a higher temperature than many liquids, including alcohol. The concentrated liquid is then left behind when the ice is removed. Also, the concentrated liquid is not normally found in pockets in the ice but as the liquid portion in the container after ice has been removed; perhaps in the barrels that didn't break if the story in the article is to be believed. Everyone has probably frozen their milk and inadvertently concentrated it.

The Regina Male Voice Choir presented their annual Christmas Concert at Bushwakker earlier this month.
The highlight of the evening is the singing of The Boar’s Head Carol. A huge stuffed boar’s head is paraded throughout the pub while the carol is sung.

TIME OUT: Preparation for Parenthood- final installment

10. Go to your local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a pre-school child -- a fully grown goat is excellent. If you intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat. Buy your week's groceries without letting the goats out of your sight. Pay for everything the goats eat or destroy. Until you can easily accomplish this do not even contemplate having children.

11. Hollow out a melon. Make a small hole in the side. Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from side to side. Now get a bowl of soggy Fruit Loops and attempt to spoon it into the swaying melon by pretending to be an airplane. Continue until half of the Fruit Loops are gone. Tip the rest into your lap, making sure that a lot of it falls on the floor. You are now ready to feed a 12-month old baby.

12. Learn the names of every character from Barney and Friends, Sesame Street and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. When you find yourself singing "I love you, you love me," at work, now you finally qualify as a parent!